Friday, April 27, 2007

Last week, Hillary Clinton issued what she called the "Rutgers pledge" in the wake of the Don Imus firing:

"Will you be willing to speak up and say, "Enough is enough,' when women or minorities or the innocent or powerless are marginalized or denigrated?" Clinton said in her speech to about 700 people. "Will you say there's no place -- if there ever was, there certainly isn't now -- for disrespect or bigotry to be seen as funny?"

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton caused a minor stir this week with her guest-blogging appearance at Firedoglake, a site where one of the lead bloggers last year painted Sen. Joseph Lieberman in blackface before apologizing and removing the entry at the behest of Lieberman's opponent.

Clinton, D-N.Y., posted an entry at Firedoglake on Tuesday to mark Equal Pay Day and to tout her legislation aimed at guaranteeing women the same pay as men when they do the same work. Clinton also briefly engaged the blog's readers in the comments at the bottom of her post.

Mary Ann Akers, who writes The Sleuth blog for The Washington Post, reported that Democratic activists privately questioned Clinton's decision to appear on Firedoglake because of the tarnished reputation of Jane Hamsher, one of its chief bloggers.

Last summer, while following Democrat Ned Lamont of Connecticut in his bid to unseat fellow Democrat Lieberman, Hamsher posted an image of Lieberman in blackface at The Huffington Post. Although Hamsher never worked in a paid capacity for Lamont's campaign, she did produce a video for the campaign. Her close connections to Lamont prompted the campaign to contact her about the image.

She deleted it and apologized, but according to Akers, the incident is fresh enough in the minds of some Democrats that they think Clinton should have kept her distance from Firedoglake.

Hamsher's blog is the site where one unhinged regular blogger (not a commenter, mind you, but a Hamsher-approved guest blogger...like Hillary) attacked Democrat Ellen Tauscher as a "prostitute" and applauded another blogger for calling her "a bribe-taking corporate whore and shit eater who has guaranteed herself a nasty primary in 2008."